Don't expect a new Star Wars game from EA before April 2014

Electronic Arts announced earlier this week that it had snapped up the rights to the Star Wars series in a multi-year deal with Disney, though don’t expect to see a new game out anytime soon.

The publisher confirmed during its financial call that it is ‘not planning’ on releasing a Star Wars game in FY2014, which wraps on March 31, 2014.

As a result of the deal with Disney, EA will developer Star Wars titles for “a core gaming audience,” with games “spanning all interactive platforms and the most popular game genres.”

Frank Gibeau, head of EA Labels, commented, “Some of our most renowned and innovative creative teams are working on ideas in the Star Wars universe.”

“The new games may borrow from films, but will be entirely new stories and gameplay,” he continued. “Powering it all will be our Frostbite 3 game engine.”

Disney will retain “certain rights” in regards to developing new games for mobile, social, tablet and online game spaces. However, Gibeau noted that EA will not be restricted from developing games for those platforms, either.

“I do want to clarify one thing - we do have have rights to make the games on all platforms; console, PC, mobile and tablet," clarified Gibeau.

"For the products that we're building, you can expect that you will see them across all of those major platforms and we're very excited about it. The Studios at DICE, Visceral and BioWare are really fired up and we're excited about this opportunity and how it fits into our overall portfolio."